Web Programming, Linux System Administation, and Entrepreneurship in Athens Georgia

Verizon 5750 on Linux

About a week ago, I subscribed to Verizon’s EVDO service so that I can get online from practically anywhere. The first few days, I had it running on a Windows machine and that was pretty simple to install. I finally got around to putting Ubuntu on that machine and getting it working under Linux which was also pretty painless.

I specifically chose the 5750 because I found plenty of online documentation for getting it working. Specifically this post, which has some pretty simple instructions. Within about 30 minutes, I had configured my fresh Ubuntu install to work fine with the card. It’s not perfect yet and at this point I still need to run a couple manual commands to get it to connect each time. Also, I’m not sure how to make it cleanly disconnect so that I can reconnect to a wifi service when that is available. I haven’t played with it much past getting it working though, so I’m sure I’ll figure out the rest soon enough.

Performance seems pretty impressive. Speed tests have usually been around 500-700 kbps down and 120-200k up. I’ve seen it as high as 1.6 Mbps down/700k up though. When sitting stationary, latency has been around 100ms to google.com, compared to about 40ms on my Comcast connection. That is decent enough to work with an interactive shell on and to use vim remotely without too much complaint.

I just finished testing latency during a 40 minute car ride. I pinged google the entire way home for a quick test. Although not as impressive overall, I was still impressed that it stayed connected and had less than 1% loss. Latency got as high as 6600 ms though, and the average latency was 272 ms, so that would be more difficult to do something interactive like a remote shell.

Overall, I’m impressed so far. Verizon has their 30 day test, so that has been nice that I had the chance to test everything out and would be able to cancel if necessary. At this point though, I’m satisified with the ease of getting it working under Ubuntu, and the performance so it looks like I’ll be keeping it.